Xinhua Unveils Bionic Humanoid Robot News Anchors with UBTECH

Xinhua News Agency unveiled two bionic humanoid robot news anchors developed with UBTECH on November 5, 2026, at the Artificial Intelligence and Chinese Modernization forum in Beijing, describing them as the world’s first of their kind.

The male anchor is Xinyu and the female anchor is Xinyan. Both use life-size human proportions and were customized for news scenarios. Xinhua says it holds complete independent intellectual-property rights for the jointly developed robots. During the forum, one robot read the opening news on stage, providing an immediate demonstration of the presentation role.

Designed for Broadcast Presentation

Chinese film director Zhang Yimou served as chief image designer and led the embodied visual design. His stated aim was to balance the solemn, rigorous requirements of news presentation with natural bionic realism. The design work drew on camera aesthetics and the shaping of personal demeanor, tying the robots’ appearance to the visual conventions of broadcast journalism rather than treating human resemblance as a standalone objective.

The anchors connect through a technical interface to Xinhua Yudian, the agency’s AI current-affairs information agent and authoritative corpus. Xinhua says this arrangement makes the content traceable, secure and controllable. UBTECH’s robotics contribution spans bionic skin, embodied-intelligence hardware, an operating system, an emotional large model and manufacturing of the complete robots.

Zhou Jian, UBTECH’s founder, chairman and CEO, said the resulting brain–expression–control technical chain retrieves reviewed, authoritative current-affairs information in real time and avoids dissemination risks from generative-AI hallucinations. The design makes content governance part of the robot’s operating pipeline: Xinhua’s corpus supplies the reviewed material that the machine retrieves and presents.

An Assisting Newsroom Role

Qian Tong, director of Xinhua’s New Media Center, described the robots as a new type of editorial job within the newsroom, with journalists and editors remaining the central editorial actors. Their assigned tasks include information presentation, multilingual output and live interaction in support of editorial staff. That remit positions the humanoids as presentation and interaction tools within an editorial workflow, not as autonomous authors of the news they voice.

Xinhua reports more than 220 digital and intelligent tools introduced in recent years under an approach of empowering journalists rather than replacing them. Forum participants identified human-led, machine-assisted work as a basic principle for intelligent journalism, with human judgment, field reporting and fact-checking remaining responsibilities that AI should not displace.

Planned Uses and Related AI Projects

Zhou listed research and study bases, city reception venues, overseas cultural exchanges and deep-space exploration reporting as future applications. Those are planned scenarios, distinct from the opening-news reading demonstrated at the launch. The proposed settings extend the concept from the demonstrated presentation task into public reception, cultural exchange and specialized reporting.

The New Media Center also plans the Xinhua News Agency AI Industry Alliance (Beijing Base) to link government, media, technology companies and think tanks in an innovation vehicle spanning industry, academia, research and application. The debut was accompanied by a signing ceremony for the base and the launch of a research project on mobile news-image technology and authenticity standards. Those initiatives place the physical anchor demonstration alongside work on industry coordination and the verification of visual news content.

The forum formed part of the seventh World Media Summit, which is co-hosted by Xinhua and the Beijing municipal government and runs through November 9, 2026. It brings together nearly 500 delegates from nearly 330 mainstream media outlets, think tanks, government departments and international organizations across 112 countries and regions.

The debut ties a highly visible humanoid interface to a less visible editorial system built around reviewed source material, defined newsroom tasks and human control. The central open question is how that system performs in live interaction and multilingual output as Xinhua pursues applications beyond the demonstrated on-stage reading.